Reusable Packaging Assn. honors Sweden's Svenska Retursystem with reusable packaging award for replacing single-use packaging with returnable crates and pallets, California's Full Belly Farm for replacing waxed paperboard boxes with reusable plastic totes

Elyse Blye

ARLINGTON, Virginia , July 15, 2014 (press release) – Two com­pa­nies that achieved mea­sur­able and sig­nif­i­cant cost and envi­ron­men­tal sav­ings earned the 3rd annual Reusable Pack­ag­ing Asso­ci­a­tion Excel­lence in Reusable Pack­ag­ing Award.

“We received strong sub­mis­sions this year that doc­u­mented the mul­ti­ple and far-reaching ben­e­fits of reusables on small and large scales. The award pro­gram is another exam­ple of RPA’s lead­er­ship in pro­mot­ing the value and expan­sion of reusables,” said Robert Engle, RPA Chair­man and Pres­i­dent and CEO of Inter­na­tional Con­tract Mold­ing, LLC, (ICM) an Otto Com­pany. ICM spon­sors the award program.

Sven­ska Retursys­tem estab­lishes com­mon pool­ing sys­tem in Sweden

Sven­ska Retursys­tem earned the award for com­pa­nies with rev­enues over $25 mil­lion. The com­pany led a pro­gram to estab­lish a com­mon pool­ing sys­tem for more than 200 food pro­duc­ers in Swe­den and food man­u­fac­tur­ers through­out Europe that export their goods to the Swedish trade. Every prod­uct for every gro­cery chain is deliv­ered in the same stan­dard­ized size and type of return­able crate and pal­let. Since the program’s incep­tion in 2001, nearly 1 bil­lion crates have been deliv­ered, replac­ing the same num­ber of sin­gle use pack­ag­ing. By offer­ing the whole indus­try the same terms and cost of pack­ag­ing, the pro­gram has neu­tral­ized pack­ag­ing as a com­pet­i­tive fac­tor and freed up the food pro­duc­ers to focus more on their core business.

Mea­sur­able sav­ings, doc­u­mented through inter­views with cus­tomers, users, and sur­veys, include:

• Store staff save 45 min­utes a day in labor, a sav­ings of 725,000 hours and $22 mil­lion dol­lars annually.
• The cost sav­ings for using reusables ver­sus expend­able pack­ag­ing for one year is $18.7 million.
• Food waste is reduced thanks to the bet­ter pro­tec­tion pro­vided by the pack­ag­ing. One exam­ple: an egg sup­plier reports a 75 per­cent reduc­tion in bro­ken eggs.
• A life cycle assess­ment con­ducted by an inde­pen­dent firm found the return­able crate gave rise to 44% less CO2e emis­sions than cor­re­spond­ing dis­pos­able pack­ag­ing. Since the program’s incep­tion, this cor­re­sponds to a reduc­tion in emis­sions of over 115 mil­lion kg of CO2e.

• Cost sav­ings of $14,161 per year in avoided waxed card­board box pur­chases; a sav­ings of 8% of total box costs. The sav­ings will con­tinue every year as long as the boxes last.
• Reduced labor to set up and stack card­board boxes and line them with paper lin­ings each day. Adding the paper lin­ing required an addi­tional per­son on the box fill­ing line — a con­sid­er­able cost for a small company.

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